A blues musician with a master's degree in history who spent 30 years hauling hazardous waste in an 18-wheeler and once tried to farm artichokes in Oklahoma. This deep dive follows William P. Homans III, better known as Watermelon Slim, born in Boston in 1949 to a prominent civil rights lawyer, raised partly in North Carolina, and enrolled at Middlebury College before dropping out to enlist for Vietnam. Severely ill in a military hospital in Cam Ranh Bay, he taught himself to play a balsa wood guitar strung with rusty wire, laid flat on his lap, using a Zippo lighter as a slide, forging the left-handed, upside-down Delta slide style he is known for today.

The episode covers his return as a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, his raw 1973 anti-war album Merry Airbrakes, his 1979 move to Pushmataha County, Oklahoma where only watermel ...